The Worst Summer Movies of 2016

Be honest: When you clicked on the link to open this page, did you think for a second this article might just say “ALL OF THEM!”

That would have been easier, but no; not every movie this summer was horrible. A few of them were great! The vast majority, though, were bad. Like punching-you-in-the-face-for-90-straight-minutes bad. Like make-you-give-up-on-the-entire-medium-of-cinema bad. Like make-you-question-your-decision-to-get-a-master’s-degree-in-film-studies bad. That bad.

Even in a sea of mediocrity, though, some movies were a cut below the rest. Here, now, are ScreenCrush’s picks for the worst of the worst from the summer of 2016. May these movies never inspire another sequel. (One of them almost definitely will. Probably two. Movies! They are awesome.)

Alice Through the Looking Glass
Directed by James Bobin

Did we really need another trip to Underland? Did we need most of this summer’s sequels? The answer to both questions is the same: Nope. James Bobin’s Alice Through the Looking Glass takes us back down the rabbit hole to revisit the characters of Tim Burton’s 2010 film, but this time without anything interesting to do. The plot: Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter is depressed. That’s pretty much it. Bobin gives us little reason to care about anything in his dull and unimaginative film. Burton’s original wasn’t very good to start with, but at least it featured the director’s signature style and immaculate eye for detail. We get none of that here, just actors caked in too much makeup amid scenery swaddled in distracting CGI.— Erin Whitney

20th Century Fox

Independence Day: Resurgence
Directed by Roland Emmerich

This may have been the dumbest blockbuster of the summer. There were a lot of new characters in Roland Emmerich’s sequel, none of them compelling. There were a lot of aliens, in a silly plot about a war and migraine-inducing subliminal messages. And there was a lot of action, none of it any good, with doomsday sequences that look recycled from past Emmerich disaster films. It’s two hours of forgettable nonsense without Will Smith — or the charisma or emotional core he brought to the first movie. If aliens do show up on Earth, can they take Roland Emmerich back with them? — EW

The Legend of Tarzan
Directed by David Yates

There were six good things about The Legend of Tarzan, all of them on Alexander Skarsgard’s impossibly buff stomach. The rest of this reboot felt like a cynical attempt to reinvent Edgar Rice Burroughs’ jungle hero for the comic-book movie era. That approach could work, but not with slack pacing, tepid action scenes, and a cruddy villain (Christoph Waltz as Every Other Christoph Waltz Character, Basically). Samuel L. Jackson had one decent speech as Tarzan’s morally troubled sidekick, but was otherwise wasted — the same goes for Margot Robbie as Jane, minus the one good speech part. That this movie about a century-old hero with few A-list stars and no point still managed to make more than $125 million in U.S. theaters speaks volumes about the overall crapitude of this summer movie season. Give an A+ to Skarsgard’s abs, and a D to everything else. — Matt Singer

Sausage Party
Directed by Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s R-rated animated comedy is not nearly as hilarious or subversive as it thinks it is. A crass ode to Pixar, Sausage Party leans into retrograde stereotypes and juvenile humor in an unsuccessful attempt to cleverly deconstruct religion. The film is too trite to be offensive with its crude clichés (a lesbian taco?) and sloppy cultural stereotypes — like the hardly mind-blowing observation that, despite their conflict, hummus is enjoyed by both Jewish and Arab people, as broadly represented by a bagel and an Armenian Lavash (a bread product favored by Muslims, not Arabs; Armenians are neither). Sausage Party is like watching a 90-minute stoner joke that someone animated and put on YouTube. Guess you had to be there. — Britt Hayes

Warner Bros.

Suicide Squad
Directed by David Ayer

With David Ayer at the helm and an intriguing super-villain ensemble led by Will Smith and Margot Robbie, Suicide Squad failed to deliver on the promise of its entertaining trailers. You can still see Ayer’s grimy fingerprints hidden beneath layers of disastrous editing and bizarre graphics that were clearly tacked on in post-production to make the movie more “fun.” Reports of competing cuts of the film aren’t surprising in light of the exceedingly messy theatrical version, which has almost as many clashing ideas as characters — all of which are woefully underdeveloped. Maybe Warner Bros. should stop putting so much energy into reverse-engineering a comic-book universe and start focusing on creating characters that we actually enjoy watching. You know it’s bad when you walk out of the theater and think, “That movie could have used more Jared Leto.” — BH